The new project quickly attracted a group of enthusiastic developers and they pushed out code with a frentic pace. kdelibs-0.0.1 was released in November, containing the first classes KConfig and KApplication. In May 1997 the young project presented at the Linux-Kongress in Würzburg. In August Kalle Dalheimer published the famous article about KDE in the German computer magazine c't which attracted a whole generation of KDE developers to the project. On Jul 12th 1998 KDE 1.0 was done and released. The community had not only implemented a friendly face for Linux but also a bunch of applications while going, including a full web browser.

No use in beating around the bush: Yakuake is currently not in great shape. While the codebase made the jump to KDE Frameworks 5 quite early, it took a long time to get releases out, and the latest still suffers from some annoying, if minor, regressions and bugs. The same is also true for outside code Yakuake heavily relies on - namely Konsole, which unfortunately broke some APIs used by Yakuake, including the one used to invoke the "Manage Profiles" dialog. Meh.

Alongside this there's a more fundamental problem, which is that Yakuake's basic UI code has not aged well. There's some nice things to say about Yakuake's theming system, including a stable file format with unbroken backwards compatibility for more than a decade. But that also hints at the fact that it was designed for systems of that era, and for example can't handle scaling to hi-dpi displays at all.

Kube is a next generation communication and collaboration client, built with QtQuick on top of a high performance, low resource usage core called Sink.
It provides online and offline access to all your mail, contacts, calendars, notes, todo’s etc.
Kube has a strong focus on usability and the team works with designers and Ux experts from the ground up, to build a product that is not only visually appealing but also a joy to use.

The KDE project was founded in 1996, and since then has been an important part of the Linux landscape. In addition to the well known desktop environment, it also includes a number of essential utilities and tools.

Now, a project wants to revive what KDE looked like in 1998, when the first ever release version of KDE came out.

20 years ago today Matthias Ettrich sent an email that would mark the start of KDE as we know it today - a world-wide community of amazing people creating Free Software for you. In his email he announced the new Kool Desktop Environment and said “Programmers wanted!” In the 20 years since then so much has happened. We released great software, fought for software freedom and empowered people all over the world to take charge of their digital life. In many ways we have achieved what we set out to do 20 years ago - “a consistant, nice looking free desktop-environment” and more. Millions of people use KDE’s software every single day to do their work, have fun and connect to the most important people in their life. And yet we still have a long way ahead of us. Our job is far from done.

As expected, KDE announced today, October 13, 2016, the general availability of the second point release of their KDE Applications 16.08 software suite for the latest KDE Plasma 5 desktop environments.

That's right, we're talking about KDE Applications 16.08.2, which comes five weeks after the first maintenance update, promising to address over 30 issues and annoyances that have been reported by users since KDE Applications 16.08.1, which launched last month on the 8th of September.

There are lots of different kinds of animation: hand-drawn, stop motion, cut-out, 3D, rotoscoping, pixilation, machinima, ASCII, and probably more. Animation isn't easy, by any means; it's a complex process requiring patience and dedication, but the good news is open source supplies plenty of high-quality animation tools.

Over the next three months I'll highlight three open source applications that are reliable, stable, and efficient in enabling users to create animated movies of their own. I'll concentrate on three of the most essential disciplines in animation: hand-drawn cel animation, digitally tweened animation, and stop motion. Although the tools are fairly specific to the task, these principles apply to other styles of animation as well.

You can read about some of the more technical details about animation in Animation Basics by Nikhil Sukul.

Today, October 13, 2016, Kdenlive developer Farid Abdelnour announced the release and immediate availability of the second maintenance update to the Kdenlive 16.08 open-source video editor software project.

Distributed as part of the soon-to-be-released KDE Applications 16.08.2 software suite for the latest KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS desktop environment, Kdenlive 16.08.2 is here five weeks after the release of the previous maintenance version with no less than 36 improvements and bug fixes, addressing keyframe, UI, workflow, compilation, and proxy clip rendering related issues reported by users.

Today, October 12, 2016, the Qt Company, through Tuukka Turunen, announced the general availability of the second maintenance release to the long-term supported Qt 5.6 open-source and cross-platform GUI toolkit.

Qt 5.6.2 is here four months after the release of the first maintenance version, Qt 5.6.1, bringing approximately 900 improvements and bug fixes to keep Qt 5.6 a stable and reliable release for Qt application developers on GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

"This is the second patch release to the long-term supported Qt 5.6, and there will still be more patch releases to come. While a patch release does not bring new features, it contains security fixes, error corrections and general improvements," says Tuukka Turunen in today's announcement.

I am please to inform that Qt 5.6.2 has been released today. This is the second patch release to the long-term supported Qt 5.6, and there will still be more patch releases to come. While a patch release does not bring new features, it contains security fixes, error corrections and general improvements.

For people who wish to keep up with the latest developments in KDE software and the Plasma desktop, one way to get a vanilla, cutting edge preview of what is coming out of the KDE project is to run KDE neon. KDE neon is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution and live DVD featuring the latest KDE Plasma desktop and other KDE community software. Besides the installable DVD image, the project provides a rapidly-evolving software repository with all the latest KDE software. There are two editions of KDE neon, a User edition with stable releases of KDE packages, and the Developer edition which offers cutting edge development packages fresh from the build server.

At the end of September I decided to experiment with the User edition of KDE neon. The download for the User edition is approximately 970MB in size. Booting from the downloaded ISO brings up the Plasma desktop. The wallpaper is a collection of blue, purple and black regions. The application menu, task switcher and system tray sit at the bottom of the screen. The theme is mostly a combination of light grey and dark grey. On the desktop we find a single icon for launching the distribution's system installer.

KDE neon uses the Ubiquity graphical system installer it inherits from Ubuntu. The installer asks us to select our preferred language from a list and then gives us the option of downloading third-party software such as media codecs and Flash. We can also choose to download software updates during the installation process. We are then walked through disk partitioning, selecting our time zone from a map of the world, confirming our keyboard's layout and creating a user account. The installation process is pleasantly straight forward and we can typically take the defaults offered on each page. When the installer finishes setting up our new operating system we can either return to the live desktop or reboot the computer.

Once installed, KDE neon boots to a graphical login screen. Plasma is the only login session available to us and we can sign into the account we created during the installation process. The Plasma desktop looks the same as it did during the live session, but there are no icons on the desktop. We are not greeted by any welcome screen and there are no notifications or other distractions.

Shortly after signing into the Plasma desktop an icon in the system tray subtly indicates there are software updates available to us. Clicking the icon opens a widget which indicates the number of waiting updates and 42 were available the first day I was using KDE neon. At the bottom of the widget is an Update button and clicking the button launches the Discover software manager.

I really wanted to break free from that, so I started looking into GNU/Linux, and into which tools could replace those I was already used to. Krita was obviously what everybody recommended for digital painting, so here I am. If it weren’t for Krita I would still be stuck with another OS, as I do need to be able to paint for work.

There’s an LTS (long-term support) release of KDE Plasma 5 available now. The dot story is quite extensive. The FreeBSD ports for this LTS release can be found in area51 (as usual) in the plasma5 branch (as is the norm as long as we’re not done settling other KDE foundations in official ports).

There are also packages available, although those are obviously not sourced from the official FreeBSD package servers but from the KDE-FreeBSD team’s servers. Ask in #kde-freebsd on freenode if you need instructions for adding that repository server.

For benefit and convenience of fellow software engineers, we're sharing frameworks originally developed within the Kexi Project (that is KDb, KProperty, KReport). There are marked with the same version 3.0.0 and are prepared for general, standalone usage. So this combined release marks a major milestone for two efforts: porting to Qt 5 started in 2014, development of the three frameworks started in 2008.

A few moments ago, renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman had the pleasure of announcing the general availability of the Linux kernel 4.8.13 and Linux kernel 4.4.37 LTS maintenance updates.
While many rolling GNU/Linux distributions have just received the Linux 4.8.12 kernel, it looks like Linux kernel 4.8.13 is now available with more improvements and bug fixes, but it's not a major milestone. According to the appended shortlog and the diff since last week's Linux 4.8.12 kernel release, a total of 46 files were changed, with 214 insertions and 95 deletions.

openSUSE's Douglas DeMaio reports on the latest Open Source and GNU/Linux technologies that landed in the repositories of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system.

What Is A VPN Connection? Why To Use VPN?

We all have heard about VPN sometime. Most of us normal users of internet use it. To bypass the region based restrictions of services like Netflix or Youtube ( Yes, youtube has geo- restrictions too). In fact, VPN is actually mostly used for this purpose only. ​

The Libreboot C201 from Minifree is really really really ridiculously open source

Open source laptops – ones not running any commercial software whatsoever – have been the holy grail for free software fans for years. Now, with the introduction of libreboot, a truly open source boot firmware, the dream is close to fruition.
The $730 laptop is a bog standard piece of hardware but it contains only open source software. The OS, Debian, is completely open source and to avoid closed software the company has added an Atheros Wi-Fi dongle with open source drivers rather than use the built-in Wi-Fi chip.